Posted By Mark O'Neill On May 15, 2014 @ 8:00 pm In Social Media | No Comments

Spread.us[1], a tool that allows you to send requests automatically to your Twitter subscribers asking them to share content on your behalf, has announced that they will be shutting down on June 1. An email statement from the Spread.us team gave no reason for the shutdown.

Some Spread.us customers use the tool to request that subscribers share the latest WordPress posts on their site (using a small button). It also enables website readers to automatically share and distribute newly published content from their favorite blog or website.

If you are a big Microsoft fan, then with Spread.us, you could set up a filter to automatically tweet all stories about Microsoft. But that is only breaking news, and only a maximum of four times a day. Now, when there’s breaking news, you would be the first one to tweet that.

It was also designed to be used by companies as part of their PR strategy. A company could invite colleagues and friends to subscribe to the curated Spread.us list. Then that content could be shared and distributed through the accounts of all subscribers automatically. Subscribers would be notified by email when a tweet is posted on their Twitter account.

The email announcement suggests some alternative tools that can be used instead of Spread.us. Two in particular are Publicize[2], part of the WordPress Jetpack[3] service, and Thunderclap[4]. Out of the two, Publicize may be the most intuitive and easiest of the two to master in the shortest possible time.

There doesn’t seem to be any chatter online about why the service is going away, and the company itself isn’t saying anything. However, the service is not really free[5], so one possibility is that there were not enough customers for the premium services to make continued operation worthwhile.